By Julie Elizabeth Hebert
A French speaking people, the Acadians settled first in the area
of Canada now known as Nova Scotia. To their settlement, they gave
the name Acadie. From then on, people called them Acadians.
Content in their forest home, the Acadians did not ask for much from their
British and French colonial governments, nor did they wish to be bothered.
A people more than happy to be neglected, the Acadians repeatedly came
under siege in the wars of empire. Exiled and shipped to multiple
destinations, the Acadians found a home in the swamps and bayous of South
Louisiana. Here, they once again settled into a life of isolation
and contentment. As the exiles adapted to life in America, they and
their culture began to evolve. As the young country fought and won
its independence, the Acadians established permanent settlements, settlements
that remained untouched until the end of the Civil War and the dawning
of the twentieth century. With the industrial revolution in full
force, the Acadians battled assimilation. In the end, they stood
on the brink of cultural annihilation, yet in the end they fought to reclaim
their heritage. Cajun culture, a hybrid form of Acadian culture,
resulted from this evolution. This is the story of the Cajuns, their
assimilation, and their success in reclaiming their culture and their identity.
The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of the Cajuns’ battle to
resist and reclaim the culture of their ancestors, the Acadians.
On April 9, 1865, the Confederate forces under General Robert
E. Lee officially surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant bringing
the Civil War to an end. For many Louisianians and Southerners in
general, the devastating effects of the war on property, pride, and economy
continued for decades. Louisiana’s Cajuns, grateful for the end of
the draft and fighting, unknowingly entered a period of their history in
which their cultural identity suffered as a result of various American
assimilation efforts throughout the South in the final decades of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth century. Only when Cajuns
confronted their Americanization in the 1960s did a revitalization of culture
occur. Assimilation, although a profound scar on Cajun ethnicity,
functioned as a catalyst in a search for identity as Americans. Acknowledging
the effects of modernization and assimilation provides the foundation for
understanding the Cajun identity.
During the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, the division
between the Cajuns and other Louisianians increased. Several stereotypes
which still accompany the idea of “a true Cajun” developed in these eras:
lazy, ignorant, illiterate, and simple. Able to remain unassimilated
for the most part, Cajuns continued to act in the ways they had before
the war. Like all good Southerners, they still loved card games,
parties, and communal get togethers, but unlike the Americans, Cajuns continued
to work at their own pace, a work ethic which stood in complete contrast
to the American idea of progress. James Dorman, in his work on the
ethnicity of the Cajun culture, quotes several journalists of the day who
described the Cajuns as follows: “a Utopian dreamer and idler...—one who
sits on the skirts of progress,” “the Acadian who overworks is indeed a
rare avis [rare bird],” and “most of them are mere squatters on the Prairies.”1
Southerners, in general, thought little of the Cajuns and their culture
because their values negated the closely held American values of material
wealth, the Protestant work ethic, and progress. Cajuns, themselves,
thought little of American standards including those regarding education,
and Cajun folk wisdom summed up the Cajun opinion on education: “My son
is rascal enough without an education.”2 Cajuns
reveled in their illiteracy, and this attitude concerning education served
as another reason why the Americans looked down upon the “poor,” “stupid”
Cajuns of south Louisiana.3
Despite these qualities which fostered a negative stereotype
of Cajuns, observers of Cajun communities repeatedly remarked upon two
distinct Cajun ethnic qualities in a positive light: hospitality and family
ties. Travelers in the South during the post-Civil War era commented
upon the friendliness with which the Cajun family welcomed strangers into
their home and their willingness to share what little they had with those
in need. Motivated, not by a conscious sense of charity, but rather
by an inherited trait of hospitality, Cajuns opened their homes to all
who graced their doorsteps. Continuation of the strong family ties
among the Cajun communities, the second positive quality of Cajun culture,
survived through the institution of marriage. Cajun youth often married
among their own kind. Women of Cajun descent usually married men
of similar heritage; however, if a young Cajun woman decided to marry a
German or Creole, the family ties, although slightly altered, still remained
strong within her own family. According to most historians of this
culture, the Cajun culture continued to flourish mainly because of the
female population and the roles mothers played in childrearing and in the
preserving of family customs and traditions. Cajun women reared their
children while the men worked, and if the woman was Cajun, she reared her
children to appreciate and respect their Cajun traditions and heritage.4
Cajun children with time grew apart from their mothers and their
heritage and became susceptible to the lure of wealth and respectability.
American culture in the post-Reconstruction era offered young Cajuns these
promises in the form of education, and the Cajun children by their own
preference began to speak and read English, the language spoken by their
teachers and classmates in school. At this time the newspaper editors
began to print their papers in English only, ending the former practice
of printing the paper in both French and English. Cajun ethnic ties
began to unravel as Cajun children and local Louisiana society placed greater
emphasis on the English language, whereas before French represented an
acceptable alternative to English on the bayous, swamps, and prairies of
South Louisiana. The Cajun culture seemed to be losing some of its
rural isolationism which it had valued above all things since landing in
Louisiana, but the greatest blow to this isolationism came in 1880 when
the Louisiana-Western Railroad finished laying its tracks connecting New
Orleans to Houston.5
With this railroad came the development of small communities to “service
the track and to make use of the rail facility for commerce and trade.”6
These communities developed into towns which resembled the American “ideal
of urbanization.”7 They became equipped with
all the necessities of a bustling mini-metropolis. This, of course,
included professionals and healthcare providers. Schools and businesses
sprung up everywhere laying siege to the little Cajun communities.
Cajuns who remained in town quickly became urbanized:
Those who remained in the towns...quickly acculturated to the norms necessary for their survival in that setting, learning to speak English, for example, and to conduct business according to the dictates of the Anglo-bourgeois commercial world, and to take advantage of such urban institutions as the local public school, barroom, billiard parlor, playhouse, bank and barber shop. These were decidedly sophisticated civilities by contrast with “simpler” country life: Too much so for many.8
The majority of the Cajun country population remained alienated
from these new surroundings. Many, in fact, chose to leave the city
and return to the country and their simple agrarian existence. Rural
Cajun folk became the preservers of the Cajun culture, while the urban
Cajuns adjusted to city life and the American way of living. Once
again a vital area of Acadian land came under siege, and the Cajuns, true
to their Acadian roots, proved their ability to adapt and to maintain their
ethnic dissimilitude. Urbanization failed to break the Cajun ethnic
bond among the rural community in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Next came Huey P. Long with his “better farm-to-market” roads which
posed yet another threat to Cajun isolationism.
Although Long made an early and effective pitch to the descendants of Evangeline’s people, noting their needs had long been too ignored by the state’s politicians, what Huey promised (and to a degree at least delivered)—free textbooks, improved schools, roads, hospitals, public services—were needed as much by Cajuns as by other disadvantaged rural inhabitants. But their delivery constitute yet another threat to Cajun ethnic survival.9
Even if Long failed to realize the effects of his actions, his efforts
to give to the Cajun people what they “desperately” needed served as an
assimilation technique. Those influenced by these improvements most
likely did not realize the extent to which these improvements functioned
as infiltrators of their isolationism and their ethnic culture. Despite
all the necessary changes brought by the Long administration, one piece
of legislation issued a substantial blow to the Cajun ethnic identity:
the Louisiana Constitution of 1921. Through this document, the legislature
denied public schools the right to instruct children in both French and
English. Most Cajun rural folk and children were monolingual and
able to speak very few words of English. Louisiana legislators through
this law in essence denied Cajun children the right to education in their
primary language forcing them either to learn English or remain illiterate.
In effect this law further emphasized the language barrier between the
Cajuns and the “others,” and most Anglo-Louisianians obtained another reason
to believe in the inferiority of the French-speaking population.
As the ethnic ties of the community as a whole continued to unravel, the
negative stereotype in regards to French speakers remained a constant on
the Louisiana social landscape. Through all of this, rural Cajun
culture survived almost untouched, and observers of these decades described
the rural Cajuns in much the same way as others had described them in previous
decades:
“Their homes are always spotless, and there is always a welcome and a cup of black coffee for any caller, even though he be a stranger,” a typical Cajun “lives in his own home, usually with several relatives, besides his immediate family. He keeps a cow, some chickens, and raises a few vegetables which he sometimes sells. Sometimes he helps keep a store in the nearby village,” and “an unsophisticated agrarian people who have clung tenaciously to their old customs and traditions.”10
Because of their “geographic, occupation, and language isolation,”
the rural Cajuns achieved a social isolationism “greater than that of any
other American ethnic group.”11 People in
the 1920s and 1930s identified this Cajun ethnicity and began to describe
the Cajun culture based on its ethnic qualities. While the urban
Cajun assimilated, the rural Cajun in his isolation preserved his cultural
traditions.12
With the advent of the Second World War, another threat to Cajun isolationism
emerged. Many young Cajun men drafted into the armed services began
to be acculturated into mainstream Anglo-American values. Returning
from the war, these men believed in the inferiority of their culture and
impressed their opinions upon their wives and children so that the next
generation felt more firmly than the first this shame of their Cajun culture:
Moreover, the evidence suggests that the Cajun people themselves came increasingly to internalize the negative value attachments to their ethnic status: They increasingly came to believe in their own ethnic cultural “inferiority.” That the qualities of negative ascription were often present among the members of the group (in the form of self-denigration and self-abnegation) has been confirmed through literally scores of interviews, formal and informal, that [the author] has conducted over the years since the beginning of the decade of the 1950s.13
In this era, bilingual parents refused to speak Cajun French with
the children, and a new generation of Acadian descendants grew up never
learning Cajun French. Cajun parents’ failure to converse with their
children in their cultural language dealt the strongest blow to Cajun ethnicity
and heritage. Cajuns of the 1940s and 1950s honestly believed that
they were acting in the best interest of their children by rearing them
with American values. Cajun values still seeped through, and many
of the core elements of this ethnic culture ingrained in the Cajun subconscious
survived. Most parents failed to realize that they unconsciously
passed down their Cajun traits to their children through their own practices
and beliefs.14
The Rural Electrification Administration, an agency of the first
New Deal created in May 1935, delivered the final blow to the Cajun isolationism
of the rural folk when it finally reached Louisiana in the late 1940s and
1950s. Initially an agency meant to place the rural farmer on the
same level as urbanites with free government sponsored electricity in a
time when poverty and the Great Depression plagued the nation and brought
Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House, the REA broke the final barrier
separating the rural Cajun communities from the urban centers; the core
groups which had maintained the quintessential elements of the Cajun ethnic
identity, language, customs, and lifestyle, succumbed finally, breached
by Americanization. Many predicted the death of the Cajun culture:
As Professor Mathe Allain has pointed out, the onset of modernity in transportation, mechanization, and urbanization undermined the structural-functional need for the continuance of the old ways, both in material and non-material culture.15
With the advent of supermarkets, the need for boucheries deteriorated,
and the variety of foods available in these markets expanded the Cajun
palate which undermined the traditional cuisine. The bals de maisons
found their replacements in the radio, the television set, and the movie
theater. Cajun music came under attack, as well, and in the 1950s
others called this music “Chanky-Chank” music “suggesting the simplicity
of instrumentation and rhythm as well as the characteristically reiterative
harmonic line.”16 Modernization resulted
in a definite decline in the rural Cajun ethnic culture.17
Then in the 1960s, America experienced an age of ethnicity in which
various people of varying ethnic cultures began to reclaim their ethnicity.
For the Cajuns, a man by the name of Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc of Abbeville
led this ethnic effort, and his book, in which he set out to revive the
Cajun spirit, The True Story of the Acadians presented a concrete example
for evaluating and recording Cajun ethnicity. By 1966, the publishers
issued its third edition, and the Cajun revitalization movement shifted
into high gear. A rebirth of the Cajun language, Cajun music, and
Cajun cooking emerged. Revitalization of Cajun culture began at the
top of the social ladder, and not at the bottom like most ethnic movements
of this time in the United States. Leaders in the South Louisiana
community worried about the disappearance of the French language in the
area. In an effort to preserve this dying language and this so-called
dying culture, these men worked with the legislative bodies of Louisiana
to save all the elements of their culture that they possibly could by law.
Ironically, these men refused to be labeled Cajuns and claimed to be true
decedents of the Acadians and so Acadians themselves. Remarkably,
the leading administrator of this program to reclaim the language of the
area was a Canadian, not a self-claimed Acadian or Cajun, by the name of
Dr. Raymond Rodgers. His efforts, supported by Congressman James
P. Domengeaux of Lafayette, resulted in the formation of CODOFIL (“Council
for the Development of French in Louisiana”) and other such legislation
in the summer of 1968. The legislature created CODOFIL to:
further the preservation and utilization of the French language and culture of Louisiana by strengthening its position in the public schools of the State, and [to provide] requirements that the culture and history of French populations in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Americas, shall be taught for a sequence of years in the public elementary and high schools systems of the State.18
During this session the legislature passed a bill which once again
allowed for the publication of State legal documents in French as well
as English and agreed upon a resolution to “establish cultural ties with
the French-speaking Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick.”19
In 1969, the legislature designated twenty-two parishes of the “old French
Triangle ‘Acadiana’.”20 By 1974, the legislature
officially adopted an “Acadiana” flag.21
Class division within the South Louisiana community again resurfaced
in debates concerning the CODOFIL legislation, especially in regards to
French linguistic education. Legislators in their creation of this
act sought to preserve French culture in Louisiana which entailed the teaching
of Parisian or Standard French in all elementary and high schools.
Cajuns took exception to this because they felt that Standard French did
not adequately represent the French culture of South Louisiana. Furthermore,
the implementation of this legislation in the school system brought Cajun
culture and Cajun French-speaking children under scrutiny. Unaccustomed
to speaking Standard French, Cajun children suffered various reprimands
from instructors and ridicule and derision from their classmates because
of their accents and their cultural form of French. Cajuns, seeing
this legislation as a derogatory element employed by the Establishment
to attack their culture and their children, spurned CODOFIL.22
CODOFIL, however, brought about several positive results which benefited
Cajuns and their efforts to reclaim their ethnicity like its association
with other movements to revitalize the French culture of Louisiana.
In 1968 CODOFIL took credit for bringing about the first conference “to
foster a Great Reunion of the Acadian People, together with the French-speaking
Communities of North America.”23 In the propaganda
for this event held in Lafayette on December 3 and 4, no mention of the
word Cajun appeared, yet the festival did include elements of Cajun music
and other aspects of Cajun culture on display. Cajuns of this
area attended in droves:
The local population turned out in large numbers for the occasion. The South Louisiana area is renowned for its festivals, which provide an opportunity for revelry and bon temps nearly irresistible to the regional population, Cajun and otherwise. The participation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of “just plain Cajuns” in this first festival given in honor of their “heritage” and featuring their “culture” unquestionably served to elevate the ethnic consciousness of a people whose subculture was close to extinction.24
The success of this celebration motivated the establishment of annual
celebrations of ethnicity and culture. Hommage a Musique Acadienne
, a festival to celebrate Cajun music folk traditions and lore sponsored
by CODOFIL and the Smithsonian Institution also resulted from this celebration.25
Cajuns came together to celebrate and had a good time as well dancing and
eating good home cooking, while taking pride in their musical culture and
celebrating “being Cajun.”
As a revitalization of this dying culture occurred, the word “Cajun”
took on a whole new persona and connotation, one defined by the Cajuns
themselves. A person can travel all over the world and see advertisements
for Cajun cooking and Cajun humor, but what do these advertisements actually
represent? Quite simply they represent a culture’s acceptance and
pride of its heritage and its members.
This process of change still continues, and ironically, the efforts
of CODOFIL have produced a renewed interest among the Cajun peoples of
South Louisiana in their heritage and culture, an interest developed through
a desire to set the record straight and to prevent the CODOFIL movement
from totally ignoring the Cajun aspects of Louisiana French culture.
Cajun history and culture also attracts the interests of outsiders which
one can see in the Smithsonian sponsorship of the Cajun music festival.
Motivated by profit the interest of some of these outsiders has not benefited
Cajun efforts to preserve their culture, yet some outsiders do contribute
insight and scholarship which serve to advance the Cajun ethnic search.
Putting the label Cajun on anything seems to guarantee the marketability
of the product. Why the word Cajun attracts so much attention possibly
results from the pride that the Cajun people have in themselves and their
culture. Experts must admit that CODOFIL plays a major role in renewing
this pride by its demands, time and again, that the elitist values of the
“Acadians,” which some seem to equate with Parisian French values, be implemented
and upheld while the Cajun culture and values should be overlooked and
looked down upon. Louisiana Cajun population’s reevaluation of its
heritage and culture owes much to this legislation and the uproar its implementation
brought about in the community.
Recently, Cajun adaptability became evident with the oil crisis of
the 1980s. During the last few years of this decade, more Cajuns
left the state than ever before as a result of downsizing and recession
in the oil industry. A new diaspora of the Cajun population occurred
in this decade because of occupational necessity and the greater emphasis
placed on higher education in the work force. Increasing respect
and demand for advanced education in the work force caused many young Cajun
adults to leave the state to continue their education. Remarkably
though, those who left often lamented their departure for various reasons
but most commonly because of the loss of their Cajun family and community
spirit. Other people of the United States seemed to lack the feeling
of togetherness that the Cajuns managed to preserve throughout all their
trials and assimilation. Many as well received condescending receptions
because of their Cajun heritage, but unlike before, these men and women
seem to respect their culture and heritage even more in the face of this
adversity.26
Cajun culture thrives in these men and women. Acadian and Cajun
scholars, who have produced most of the scholarship completed to date on
Acadians, Cajuns, and their cultures, usually leave the state and return
to continue their work in this field once they have earned their graduate
and doctorate degrees. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette houses
the Center for Louisiana Studies, currently the largest institution for
Acadian and Cajun studies in the world.27
Associate director of the Center and leading Acadian/Cajun scholar Dr.
Carl Brasseaux, a Cajun, ironically left the state to attend graduate school
and to work on his doctoral thesis and continues to publish several of
his books through the University Press of Mississippi. Most historians
of this field consider him to be the leading expert on Acadian and Cajun
history. Other historians like Shane Bernard have taken interest
in this field in their graduate and doctoral work which guarantees a continuation
and expansion of this field of historical study. Scholars definitely
consider Acadian and Cajun history one of the new and exciting historical
fields of the last few decades of the twentieth century. Faced with
near extinction, the Cajun culture of Louisiana displayed its most profound
ethnic trait by not only surviving, but prospering in the midst of adversity.
Notes
1Dorman, James H. The People Called Cajuns:
An Introduction to an Ethnohistory. (Lafayette, LA: U of Southwestern
Louisiana P, 1983). p. 61.
2Dorman, p. 60.
3Dorman, p. 53-65; Lawrence E. Estaville, Jr.,
“Changeless Cajuns: Nineteenth Century Reality or Myth?”, Louisiana History,
Vol 28, (1987), p. 117-140; Glenn R. Conrad, “The Acadians: Myths and Realities”
in The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, ed. Glenn R. Conrad
(Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983), p. 1-14.
4Brasseaux, Acadian, p. 106-111; Dorman,
p. 59-62; Estaville, p. 117-119
5Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education:
From Cultural Isolation to Mainstream America,” in The Cajuns: Essays on
Their History and Culture, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayette, LA: Center for
Louisiana Studies, 1983), p. 133-142; Conrad, p. 10-14; Dorman, p. 62-63.
6Dorman, p. 63.
7Dorman, p. 63-64.
8Dorman, p. 65.
9Dorman, p. 69.
10Dorman, p. 71-72.
11Dorman, p. 72.
12Conrad, p. 1-14; Dorman, p. 69-72; James
H. Dorman, “The Cajuns: Ethnogenesis and the Shaping of Group Consciousness,”
in The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture, ed. Glenn R. Conrad
(Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983) , p.233-246; Hosea
Phillips, “The Spoken French of Louisiana,” in The Cajuns: Essays on Their
History and Culture, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana
Studies, 1983), p. 145-155.
13Dorman, p. 74-75.
14Conrad, p. 12-14; Dorman, p. 74-75;
Robin Meche Kube, “Cajun Soldiers During WWII: Reflection on Louisiana’s
French Language and People,” Louisiana History, Vol. 35, (1994), p. 345-349;
Interview with Carl Brasseaux, Center for Louisiana Studies, Lafayette,
Louisiana, June 10, 1999; Interview with Dr. Leo P. Hebert, Thibodaux,
Louisiana, June 10, 1999.
15Dorman, p. 76.
16Dorman, p. 77.
17Conrad, p. 12-14; Dorman, p. 74-77;
Interviews with Brasseaux and Hebert.
18Dorman, p. 82; Louisiana Revised Statues,
Act. Nos. 408-409, July 20, 1968.
19Dorman, p. 82; Louisiana Revised Statues,
Act. Nos. 256, July 19, 1968.
20Dorman, p. 82-83; House Concurrent Resolution
No. 81, July 20, 1968. These parishes include Acadia, Ascension,
Assumption, Avoyelles, Calcasieu, Cameron, Evangeline, Iberia, Iberville,
Jefferson Davis, Lafayette, Lafourche, Pointe Coupee, St. Charles, St.
James, St. John, St. Landry, St. Martin, St. Mary, Terrebonne, and Vermilion.
21Conrad, p. 1-14; Dorman, p. 76-83; Brasseaux,
Education, p. 140-142; House Concurrent Resolution No. 496, 1969.
22Brasseaux, Education, p. 140-142; Dorman,
p. 76-83; Interviews with Brasseaux and Hebert.
23Dorman, p. 86.
24Dorman, p. 86.
25Dorman, p. 87.
26Interview with Allen J. Danos, Jr.,
CEO of Danos and Curole Oil Field Contractors, Larose, Louisiana, November
23, 1999; Interview with Maria P. Hebert, New Orleans, Louisiana, December
18, 1999; Stephen Webre, “Among the Cybercajuns: Constructing Identity
in the Virtual Diaspora,” Louisiana History, Vol. 39, (1998), p. 443-456.
27Carl A. Brasseaux, “The Colonial Records
Collection of the Center for Louisiana Studies,” Louisiana History, Vol.
25, (1984), p.181-188.